24 Dec
2022
24 Dec
'22
4:15 p.m.
I thought the end of SGI hinged on two things: banking
on the Itanium
and giving up on MIPS, and their Graphics experts went off to found a
company called Nvidia... the rest was inevitable.
Founder of SGI wrote a book and in it he said he wanted to get into the PC
Graphics card market and thought the writing was on the wall but the gravy
train from the gov buyers was too good. Until it wasn't.
I remember (in the workplace) when we started seeing PC clusters take the
place of the big SGI boxes. For a while there was a claim that the
graphics output on SGI was more accurate and the PC stuff fudged it
(important in sims I guess) but we see where it all ended up.
Really without the US government as a customer I wonder how many of these
companies could have made it on industry alone.
- Ethan